“In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.”
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Famous Alan Perlis Quotes
“One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.”
“Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.”
“We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.”
“Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.”
“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.”
“A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.”
“In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.”
“A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.”
“It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.”
“If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.”
“There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.”
Source: Introduction to computer science
“If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.”
“A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.”
“A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.”
“To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.”
“Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.”
“If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.”
“One man's constant is another man's variable.”
Source: Introduction to computer science
“In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting shorter.”